There’s an obvious pattern in the length of the adult Discworld books. After a few shorter ones, they all settle in to a length of about 300 pages, with a few outliers at 360-400. Reading Rob Wilkins official biography, it’s claimed that Terry Pratchett was contracted to deliver books of 100 000 words.
Wilkins further claims that they would closely track word count when writing, and relax when they got past 100 000. “Now we’re writing on our own time”, or words to that effect.
The issue here is that no two sources of word count agree, and moreover none of them say the books are as long as 100 000 words. As an example, [L-space.org](https://www.lspace.org/books/analysis/statistics.html) claims that Feet of Clay is 94 164 words, whereas [this archived post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/hsl0o8/fantasy_word_counts_an_overhaul_of_many_of_the/) gives the number 82940. A huge discrepancy. Incidentally, my hardcover copy of the book runs to 288 pages.
Clearly, someone is making up numbers here. Is it Wilkins, L-space.org or Coach Dave on Reddit? What kind of word count would the publisher and Pratchett have been using to come up with 100 000?
by domestic_dog